Page 77 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

Duncan crossed to lean against the workbench, the very bench that Magnus had spent a considerable part of the previous evening thoroughly failing to think about while doing this same task.

“Ye ken, for a man who claims he’s got a mortal enemy plotting something against him, ye’re spending an awful lot of today thinking about something else.”

“I’m thinking about the patrols.”

“Ye’re thinking about a woman, and badly, from the look of ye.” Duncan picked up a whetstone, turned it over, set it back down. “I’d say it’s nae me business, except ye’ve nearly sliced yer thumb off twice since I walked in, so I’m making it me business.”

Magnus set the blade down rather more firmly than the moment required. “I have a fire to account for. A man with oil and a grudge, somewhere out there, planning Christ kens what. I daenae have time to…”

“To what?”

He didn’t finish the sentence. There wasn’t a version of it that didn’t sound exactly as foolish aloud as it did in his own head.

The grain stores were last, and he counted the sacks himself rather than trust the steward’s tally. Which was, he told himself, simply thoroughness. It had nothing whatsoever to do with needing something that required numbers and nothing else, something with no room in it for curls or laughter or the particular sound she made low in her throat when⁠—

“Forty-one, me Laird,” the steward said. “Same as I counted.”

“Count them again.”

“I already counted them twice.”

“Count them a third time.”

The steward gave him a look that suggested he’d long since stopped questioning his more inexplicable demands and started counting again from the beginning.

Magnus stood there in the grain store, arms crossed, watching sacks be tallied for the third time. He thought, with no small amount of disgust at himself, that he was a man who had rebuilt an entire clan out of ash and ruin with his own two hands, who had buried more men than most lairds twice his age, who did not, as a rule, lose track of a simple conversation about fence posts.

And could not, apparently, get through counting grain sacks without the whole of his attention sliding sideways toward a woman he’d promised that he would not so much as touch again before the handfasting.

“Forty-one, me Laird. Same as before.”

“Fine. Forty-one.” He turned and left before the steward could offer to count a fourth time.

He walked back toward the keep with his jaw set and his hands faintly blackened from the gate hinge.

He told himself, with more conviction than he actually felt, that tomorrow would be better. That a man with an enemy circling his lands, oil-stained furnace stones, and doubled watches to oversee had no business losing an entire day to the memory of one woman’s mouth. That whatever this was, he intended to master it the same way he’d mastered every other unruly thing on this land, by main force and sheer refusal to yield.

He did not, if he was being honest with himself, feel confident about his odds.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Magnus had decided, somewhere between the grain store and his own chamber, that the sensible course was an early night. A plate sent up, an excuse muttered about the eastern watch needing checking, anything that kept him out of a hall currently overrun with ribbons and Katherine MacDougal’s opinions.

That plan lasted exactly as long as it took Elspeth to come down the stairs.

Katherine had put her in pale green, cut close enough to the waist that it left considerably less to a man’s imagination than Magnus would have preferred at the end of a day already spent failing to master his own thoughts.

Her hair had been swept up and pinned except for two curls that had apparently declined to cooperate and now sat loose against her jaw. She was laughing at something Agnes had said on the step behind her, cheeks still flushed from it, and Magnus, three strides into the hall, forgot what he’d been walking toward.

He did not stop walking. He very nearly did, which was worse, his boots faltering half a step before he caught himself and carried on toward the head table as though nothing had happened.

Duncan, already seated with a cup in hand, did not bother hiding his grin. “Something catch yer eye, Cousin?”

“Nay.”

“Ye nearly walked into the bench.”

“I didnae.”